If you go by this week’s headlines, you may get the sense that Democrats are actually starting to get serious about putting Social Security on the agenda in this year’s elections.

But don’t believe the hype.

Yes, the Dem-leaning pressure group Americans United for Change is doing some yeoman’s work pressing the issue. And leaders on the Hill are even starting to make some promising noises.

But in general, and particularly out in the field, it’s still a pretty depressing picture.

Through my Talking Points Memo website, I frequently correspond with readers in districts around the country as they try to find out where different candidates stand on the issue. With Democrats, especially after last year, it’s a pretty straightforward matter: they oppose privatization.

With Republicans, well, they just won’t say. And why should they, since no one is pressuring them to state a position on privatization one way or another?

Let me give you an example. One reader — I’ll call her June, though that’s not her real name — got in contact with a Democrat challenging a Republican incumbent in an East Coast state. I’d call it a marginally competitive district. Not likely to flip, but possible, especially if there’s a Democratic wave in November.

So June asked the challenger whether he knew his opponent’s position on Social Security and whether he planned on making an issue of it in the campaign. The candidate’s response? As far as he knew it was a dead issue after last year. So it just wasn’t on his radar.

When she told the candidate about President Bush’s recent statements suggesting he wanted to try again to get privatization before Congress, he got more interested. Maybe he’d put something together on it.

That was about it. And from what I can tell it’s fairly representative of races around the country.

Now, as I’ve written here and elsewhere, there’s mounting evidence that President Bush and his stalwarts in Congress aren’t done with Social Security.

It’s hard to figure how he’s going to make another play for privatization while his approval numbers can’t crack 40 percent. And it’s certainly not going to happen if he loses one or both houses of Congress. But if the Republicans have an unexpectedly good Election Day this November, the groundwork will have been laid. And they’ll no doubt point to these election-season announcements about their intention to privatize Social Security as proof that an election victory constituted a mandate for their policy.

But in a sense it hardly matters.

Even if President Bush and his Republican allies wanted to forget about Social Security privatization and pretend everything from last year never happened, it still tells you something about the Democrats’ political acumen and general unseriousness that so many of them are seemingly happy to let them send the whole topic right down the memory hole.

Social Security is good policy and good politics — two things that don’t always go together. The country had a big debate about this last year, and the verdict was unmistakably against privatizing the program. That’s the Republican position, and the public came down clearly against it.

You’d think that, at the next election, the party on the public’s side of this issue would want to remind voters of where their opponents stood.

That’s even more the case when you consider that most of the Republicans running for office in November are studiously avoiding answering any question about Social Security and refusing to say where they stand on the question, even though many of them publicly supported privatization only a year ago. There are so many opportunities for uncovering flip-flops that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It is, to put it mildly, a perfect wedge issue — a resonant political issue that Democratic candidates can hit on and hit on and that Republicans are afraid to touch. And of course there’s the extra benefit in that it’s actually an issue of great substance and importance to millions of people in their daily lives, unlike the flag-burning amendment, gay marriage, the campaign to shut down The New York Times and whatever other bogus election-season issues Hill Republicans plan to gin up over the next three months.

For too many Democrats, though, it’s just out of sight out, out of mind. If Republicans are done talking about it, that’s good enough for them.

Republicans must be hoping they don’t get wise in time for November.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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